Refined Teenage Angst

Getting Over My Fear of Social Media

It’s been awhile since I posted my last blog. I had my content calendar set up for the month but life got in the way as it tends to, and writing about ‘social media’ and my New York trip suddenly seemed frivolous. However, I realize now that this is not only a pleasant distraction but a promise I made to myself, to both keep up my writing skills and learn how to market myself. This blog is important to me, and it’s unwise to skirt my personal responsibilities every time a crisis comes up. So let’s get to it, late as this may be.

Social media was not made for me, of this I am sure. There’s a degree of shamelessness that comes along with good social media marketing that I just don’t have, I am filled to the brim with shame. I hate posing for pictures, I hate hashtagging, I hate asking for follows and likes, all because when you see it I’m sure you’re wondering, “who does she think she is?”. But before I left for New York I resolved myself to getting the hell over it and taking my Instagram seriously, because Instagram is an amazing marketing tool for any type of artist.

I took my trip to New York as an opportunity to gather content so I could start posting with greater frequency, I mean New York is Instagram heaven. So the opportunity was there, the motivation was there, the challenge was resolving myself to doing something that made me so intensely uncomfortable. The solution was not doing anything that warranted the reaction I so greatly feared. Nobody is going to to wonder, “who does she think she is?”, when I’m being exactly who I am. I don’t have the followers to prove it yet, but I don’t think you have to pretend to be somebody you’re not to be successful on Instagram.

How do you be yourself when posing, if you hate posing? You embrace the awkward. When browsing Pinterest for poses I learned awkwardness can be cool if utilized correctly. I found two articles in particular that I liked, here and here. I skipped over anything with hands on hips and outspread legs, and liked anything that emphasized odd foot positions and hands held tightly to ones sides. I may not have remembered and utilized them all but I fully plan to going forward.

Being yourself in captions is the easy part, I’m not going to bother elaborating. Being yourself while hashtagging, on the other hand, is nearly impossible. My advice for this is just get the hell over it. It’s never going to be comfortable. I tried inserting self deprecating hashtags to make fun of myself for hashtagging, but it just felt even stupider. My best advice is just hiding it in the comments, all you have to do is make a comment directly after you post with five dots and then all of your hashtags. Nobody is going to see it unless they are going into your comments, and if someone is taking the time to go into your comments then they probably like you enough not to care. Furthermore, if you’re like me and hate coming up with hashtags, download “TagsForLikes”. You just search up a topic related to your post and it comes up with a ready made hashtag list for you to simply copy and paste.

Listen, putting yourself out there is never easy, but at the end of the day you just have to stop giving a shit about what people might say. I may never be able to make a feasible career out of my music, but I’m going to regret not doing everything I possibly can to make it happen more than I’m going to regret some questionable Instagram posts.